Thinking Clearly About Performance, revised to include Skew

I’ve just updated the “Thinking Clearly” paper to include an absolutely vital section that was, regrettably, missing from the first revision. It’s a section on the subject of skew.

I hope you enjoy.

Thinking Clearly About Performance

I’ve posted a new paper at method-r.com called “Thinking Clearly About Performance.” It’s a topic I’ll be presenting this year at:

• RMOUG (Denver) this month
• Miracle OpenWorld (Billund DK) in April
• UTOUG (Salt Lake City) in May
• Kaleidoscope (Washington DC) in June
  
• MOTS (Ann Arbor) in September

The paper is only 13 pages long, and I think you’ll be pleased with its information density. Here is the table of contents:

1. An Axiomatic Approach
2. What is Performance?
3. Response Time vs Throughput
4. Percentile Specifications
5. Problem Diagnosis
6. The Sequence Diagram
7. The Profile
8. Amdahl’s Law
9. Minimizing Risk
10. Load
11. Queueing Delay
12. The Knee
13. Relevance of the Knee
14. Capacity Planning
15. Random Arrivals
16. Coherency Delay
17. Performance Testing
18. Measuring
19. Performance is a Feature

As usual, I learned a lot writing it. I hope you’ll find it to be a useful distillation of how performance works.